The Nightmare and the Salvation
by Traitor of All Traitors
Summary: A side-story to My Special Keeper. Shinji reflects upon a nightmare he had at the end of the story before Rumi comes to his aid, and finds himself once more being saved by her in a special way.


Creation began on 07-02-13

Creation ended on 07-08-13

Neon Genesis Evangelion

The Nightmare and the Salvation

A/N: Part of the _My Special Keeper _universe. Just an idea of what could've taken place further in the dreams and nightmares of Shinji during the summer of Twenty-Fifteen or in the aftermath of his grandmother and aunt/lover saving the world. Here goes. Also, it'll be from Shinji's point of view.

It's not easy to erase the nightmares I got during my time at the hospital. It's not easy to forget the revelation that a man that was adopted as a baby by a woman that will forever look like a twenty-eight-year-old, could care less and less for his own child, seeing him instead as just a means to an end. All that really ever mattered to him…was her, his wife, his woman, a scientist that was just as awful as he was, and he was willing to decimate what was left of the world to reclaim her from the would-be clutches of who he deemed as a god. When the summer started, I never thought I was going to see him, that my last memory of him, however damaged, however maimed by his abandonment of me, was of a cold, rainy day…where he dumped me at my Uncle Bumi's and hit the road. And then, shortly after my fourteenth birthday, that man sends me a letter, demanding that I come see him, not even explaining why, but we all could deduce from the way his letter sounded, it was not for reconciliation or an attempt at forgiveness.

Forgiveness… There was no way I could forgive him for discarding me like I was nothing more than trash. That's not how you're supposed to treat your children! And when I saw him that day after more than a decade of growing up with the family, he only wanted to see me…just to exploit me, to use me in a war I knew nothing of ahead of time. Rumi…I thank the kami she was there with me that day. She saved my life from a former monster that was the Third Angel, Sachiel…and a real monster that was my father. She saved me…and later said she'd care about me, whether I was alive, dead or nonexistent when I was made of aware of more hidden truths.

The Eva, my mother, that terrible woman that hurt her own family in the pursuit of scientific achievement… Just thinking about her, in her true state of being and that of the purple monstrosity she made in her years after her role in causing great pain and death to the world, reminds me of the last nightmare I had before Rumi came into my room. It was back at NERV, in the deepest, darkest patch of high-tech construction, where I was wearing my hospital garments in front of Unit-01, which was much larger and more brutal in appearance, making me feel very uneasy, and that madman was there, as well, standing several feet away from me on the bridge, with glasses that were a dark shade of red.

"Get in the Eva," he ordered me to do for him. "Get in the Eva and aid me against the world."

I almost felt my legs twitching me into the direction of the open palm of Unit-01's right hand, as it snarled and opened its mouth, revealing the Entry Plug. It was as though I really had no choice but to listen to my parents, whom weren't there for me for over ten years, and this was some sort of twisted attempt to make up for all that time that was lost between us.

"So, this is truly how low you will sink, Gendo?!" I turned around and saw Rumi, dressed in her beautiful, predominantly-gold, black and purple armor that made her look like a member of the samurai, her half of the Angelbreaker talisman shining brightly on her right arm as she brandished her hook swords, accompanied by all immediate members of the Rokubungi family. "This will not be allowed to go on! You cannot treat this way someone I love that has done you no wrong, no matter how wronged you feel you were dealt!"

"Stay outta this, little girl! This is family business!" Gendo had told Rumi.

"Family business, you say?" Akira retorted, dressed exactly like Rumi, but with silver armor in place of gold with her half of the Angelbreaker. "Since you wanna talk about this being a family situation, that leaves you out for good, along with your wife."

"Yeah," went Nemo, the younger, innocent nigh-look-alike of Gendo that was an otaku and friendly face that I couldn't relate to my old man at all after everything that went down.

"Shinji," I looked and saw Shinobu, my second eldest aunt, beside Bumi, Miaka and Tsukiko. "Let's get the Hell outta here and leave that disgrace to suffer in disgrace."

I turned to walk away from Gendo and the Eva, but then the Eva raised its left arm and blocked my path to Rumi and the others on the bridge! I looked up and saw the Eva snarling at me with the plug dripping with saliva. I gasped with hesitation and fear.

"Don't leave," it growled, sounding like my mother. "Family is forever. Family is you, your father and myself. You can't leave."

"If he stayed with you two, he'd be better off elsewhere," I heard Rumi say to her, jumping up into the air and landing in front of me. "You should own up to the fact that you two failed him."

"If he faces the Angels and helps implement the Instrumentality Project, we can make up for lost time," Gendo expressed, revealing his intentions.

"And what good will come of it?!" Akira, who floated over the Eva's arm, bringing the others with her. "Don't you see, Gendo? Don't you understand your problem here and now? You can't foresee everything that has yet to happen. And worse than that…is that when what has yet to come has come, you never think everything through. You don't take into consideration the possibility of past events having effects upon people that would change them. That's exactly what happened when you found out Shinji was dying from his cancer after seeing him over ten years after you left him: You found out he was sick, that he was unwilling to help you, to fight a war he had no interest in partaking in, and then you had no one left to turn to for help!"

"You forget that your daughter was with him," Gendo told her, pointing at Rumi and myself. "I had her pilot the Eva. I deduced that she could do it and defeat the Angel."

"You're wrong, Gendo!" Rumi spoke up, countering his excuse. "You were desperate and reduced to begging! If I hadn't been with Shinji that day, if I didn't have a reason to want my nephew to see a future where he could live past what we thought would be his final year of life, everyone everywhere would've lost their lives because of you and your wife's unforgivable goals! Desperation causes people, even the coldest, cruelest of them, to perform acts that are less than noble, less than excusable."

"It's all part of mankind's destiny, little girl! It's all part of his destiny!" Gendo had explained, or rather, he tried to pass off as an explanation, and pointed at me.

I don't know where he got off saying that everything was based on the concept of destiny, something I had no understanding of, but he was sounding like a total asshole right now. Some people believed in ideals, religion, scientific explanations to the supernatural and unbelievable, or some other form of whatever it was that they believed in, but I had no belief in the concept of destiny. Destiny is just a word to me, something that others can wrap a desire, agenda or goal around and let it shape their lives. And, just maybe, it was a truth to some people that lived in the past, generations ago, like those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and American Indians. But nowadays, it was nothing but a word with nothing to back it up.

"Tell me, Gendo," I heard Akira say to him now, "since you want to talk of destiny, if you can answer this question, then. You say the Eva's Shinji's destiny…but is it really? Shinji? Do you believe it's your destiny to serve your father this way? To listen to both your parents, like it were some sort of game to them, and just jump up when they call for you? Is it really your destiny…or just a thankless, heartless duty that people you don't know because you haven't been with them for over a decade have tried to force upon your shoulders so suddenly?"

"Don't talk to him like you know him, Akira! Like you understand him better than anyone else does!" Gendo demanded of my grandmother now. "Get in the Eva right now, Shinji! You have no choice! Do as I say!"

"No, Shinji!" Rumi told me not to. "He has no hold over you! You made your choice to reject him in life, and you do so again. Even in death, he can't control you! You decide, here and now, what you wanna do!"

"Do as I say, Shinji!" My father tried to pressure me. "This is the only reason you exist for! You have no value as a person! You have no value as a person to anyone!"

"That's not for you to decide, Gendo!" Akira shot at him, and I believed her, for it wasn't for him to decide if I had no value in life. "Shinji, this is your choice. Think back on your past, look inward and reflect on what is the most important question you were asked long ago: Who are you…and what is it that you want?"

I turned away from Gendo, from the Eva, and from the path my parents tried to force me to go down.

"Don't you dare turn away from this, Shinji!" My father had yelled out. "Don't you dare run away from your responsibilities!"

"Oh, shut up, old man. You two ran away from your responsibilities, and it's not my responsibility if I don't want to get involved. There's no way I'll ever help you two," I told them, going to Rumi and the others. "You failed me in life, and you're as hopeless as can be in death. Just fade away."

We left them in that chamber, and then the whole place started rattling. The next thing I knew, we were all running through the halls, looking for the way out of the underground facility. But the place was like a labyrinth now; every hallway, every room…looking like it was constantly shifting to confuse us and crush our attempts to get free, to go home.

"Shinji!" We heard the voice of my mother, and back down the hall we had just ran through, and saw a giant hand, not at all different from the hands of Unit-01. "Don't leave me!"

As much as I thought I could forgive her for leaving me when I was little…I couldn't see myself reconciling with her, even after death. She was my mother, I could accept that much, but she had been a stranger ever since I saw her, over ten years later. She was also that idiot's wife, and was just as twisted as he had been in the pursuit of some gratification or delusion of grandeur.

"_I don't know what could drive any mother to give up their life to give life to something that's just a mockery of some other form of life,"_ I heard Akira had said to me once while we were at NERV HQ, _"but it's not something that shouldn't be accepted. The Evangelions. You give a weapon meant to destroy a will of its own, it's just a bio-weapon intended to lay waste to everything, even if its other purpose is to protect. If these dangerous machinations of science ever got put to constant use outside of their original intention, imagine what could happen to every mother out there, and that's only because the Evas live on the souls of women that had children after Second Impact."_

"_Akira, I doubt they're gonna look past the requirements of maintaining an Eva in order to use one. But then again, not everybody would share your opinion, which I respect gratefully." _I had told her.

"_Thank you, Shinji. You seem to understand what I'm getting at."_

"_I just can't find there being much use for something that causes only pain, whether it's directly or indirectly. The thought of anybody even considering that such an abomination is a necessary evil to protect people… You once explained that Kanami and Mayo had been used in one of the Evas, right? And that they were almost killed? There's no forgiving the people that allowed them to be used against their will like that, that would sacrifice a mother and her child, just to lay waste to an enemy."_

"_But what is your opinion on mothers that do what others won't do? I mean, what do you think of mothers that willingly walk out of raising their children to play disgraceful deities?"_

"_I think we both know that there's only one person that has done such a thing that you already know how I feel about. But to answer your question, I don't appreciate a mother that willingly left her kid to play a fake deity. It's nothing to be proud of. The next thing you know, they'll be sacrificing even elderly women if they themselves bore children after Second Impact, and we both know what type of impact that would have on the kid that was ripped from their mother."_

"_If something like that were to happen to this elderly mother, she'd sooner fight back with all that she is than to be reduced to a ghost in the shell, Shinji. No mother should be made to choose between raising her child or leaving them alone."_

Akira had never openly admitted it to anyone, but I could tell that my mother's work, the Evangelions, were something in this new century that she detested extremely. I could agree with her, wholeheartedly, along with Nemo's moral, scientific and otaku views on the subject that they were nothing more than an attempt to play Kami, to abandon the blessing and curse of mortality. People live with crazy, foolish and desperate dreams of escaping the possibilities of death because they fear what lies beyond it. I used to fear it myself, when I was sickly with my cancer, and then I went to simply waiting for it to come claim me, to stop my suffering, both the physical and the emotional. I wonder if my older self from a different time where he was cursed with eternity felt the way I did when I longed for the end of my life, and then longed for more time to waste with Rumi and the others, and then long for the end again when he lost everyone and everything to his parents.

"Don't leave you?" I asked her, seeing her inhuman face. "You're already dead! You didn't come back for me in the decade that I was abandoned…and you can't have me back now! You killed yourself and your husband when you couldn't go on living with your guilt, your shame. And so, you faced retribution. You sent yourself to Hell with that idiot you married. There's no redemption, no absolution for someone like you two. You're a nightmare I want to wake up from and forget!"

The hallway started to crack and fracture in places, as though the whole facility was about crumble in and become a tomb.

"Shinji, you don't mean that," Yui told me.

"You're wrong," I countered. "I'm walking away from all of this and not regretting my choice. You helped to maim the world…and Rumi and Akira, they just got through with healing it, something you and your brand of science, your so-called way of helping to restore it, couldn't do because the price to do it was too high. What kind of person does what you've done to people and expect to be forgiven for your cruelty? You and that man are failures and cannot be forgiven. I can't forgive you. There won't even be a time where I can consider forgiving you. I mean, you've caused more harm in your one lifetime than any other person has in their lifetime! You brought your shame upon yourself, you know. You could've stopped with your sister, you could've turned away from working on the Evangelion and committed yourself to being one of those mothers from the working, upper-middle or lower-middle classes that I could've been proud of, not some stranger that your husband wanted all for himself."

The purple Eva then lowered its arm and made an ugly expression on its face that seemed akin to realization and sadness. Its glowing eyes dimmed as its head lowered to the ground, just in time for the floor beneath to give. I could imagine, for different reasons, my life being played out differently in various ways now: In one, I had died when I was little from a car crash, and in another, I threw my life away to save someone else's due to the Evangelions, which, for some odd reason, I was inside of one of them. Maybe these were what the older me had stated about when he suffered from nightmares of his life being relived in different variations, where most of them ended on bad notes…and where the family he grew up knowing, grew up loving…didn't exist for him.

Soon enough, I felt a tiny hand holding my own, and saw Rumi, pulling me softly to safety.

"Shinji," she spoke up, floating in front of me with armored wings the size of footballs sprouting from her armored back. "Let's go home now."

I nodded in agreement with her, wanting to get away, to wake up.

-x-

GASP! I awoke the next day, looking up at my blue and green ceiling. A nightmare so awful that it was like living my life allover again, without positive solutions, excluding the people I grew up around. Sleep didn't come back so easily for a short while, despite the feeling of exhaustion in my brain…until Rumi came into my room.

"…_You want to talk about it?"_ She had asked me, referring to my nightmare, but I told her no, that maybe later, when I was rested, and she went to bed beside me at my request.

I think most men my age would be thrilled to have somebody that loves them sleeping in their bed, but I guess the majority of my sense of feeling thrills died a while ago; with Rumi, it was just one experience that had add-ons every now and then. It was also a habit of hers that needed to stop sooner or later, and Rumi had promised that it would end, eventually, but, somehow, we both didn't think it would stop anytime soon, because Rumi was right about something relating to promises like that: The best kind of promises were the ones we couldn't keep…but we make various measures of effort to try. It was a short while after I fell asleep again, but when I awoke to the rising sun the next day, I felt better, with a clearer head and lighter heart.

"Good morning, Shinji," Rumi spoke to me as she woke up.

"Good morning, Rumi," I responded.

"Feeling better?"

"Much better."

She stood on my bed and kissed my cheek.

"I had a good dream about you," she told me.

"Oh, really?" I asked her.

"Yes. We were on this highway leading away from a freeway, it was night out, and we were waiting for the sun to rise. When it did, the highway changed into a field of flowers and trees, with beautiful mountains with snowy tops. There was a giant panda waiting for us on the road and it was leading us into the sunset."

"That's…a really good dream there, Rumi," I told her, and got out of bed.

In the end, after a bad dream, it seemed that Rumi, among others, was my salvation. All I had to do was think about her…and nothing painful, nothing cruel…could ever touch me again. All I'd need to do…is remember the good times we had, whether they were spent in the hospital, at home…or out of the town elsewhere. And then, there was what she had said to Lilith back when I had been rescued by her, Anne-Marie and the rest.

"_If you ever come after my boy again, I will not be merciful next time,"_ she had told her, and it still surprised me a little to hear her say that; it could've just been a spur of the moment due to the danger, but my heart told me a little differently.

"Hey, Shinji?" Rumi asked me, just as I took off my shirt.

"Hmm?" I responded.

"After school today… Do you… Do you wanna go to the library with me to do homework?"

"Sure," I answered her; if she was trying to make it seem like one of those pretender dates…she was doing well, despite our being told to take our newfound romance slow, since we were still young and had our whole lives ahead of us.

"Great, because my teacher says my homework will relate to my relatives. I must ask them a specific question the teacher gives me."

"Something tells me it won't be an easy question."

"I won't know until I get the question I'm to ask. I better go to my room and change now."

"Okay. See you at breakfast."

As I tied my shoes, I looked at my bedside drawer and at my locket laying open on the counter. For an object made of gold of the highest purity, being twenty-four karat, whatever monetary value it might've possessed paled completely in comparison to the sentimental value it had. How Akira got it is beyond me, but I could take a guess that she herself had made it in the period of time she was carrying Rumi; I guess beautiful women, especially the ones that can't age any further after reaching their prime and can live up to over half a millennium, have hidden ways of getting something they need to do something they want for people they love. I looked at the picture displayed in the locket, thinking that Rumi and I were long overdue for another picture together. Yeah, we were definitely overdue.

Sometimes, dreams can turn into nightmares, and there are times where your life becomes a nightmare before you can wake from it or before you can live it. There are those that want to hurt you. There are those that want to exploit you for their own benefit. And there are those that desperately, truly, wholeheartedly, want to help you, to show you the path to freedom and acceptance, to where the heart that longs for a home can find it close by, or even to other people wanting only some measure of forgiveness or acknowledgment that they were never granted in some way. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe in your future that is yet to come, there's a little person looking for you, promising a life full of hugs and kisses.

A/N: Well, here's another story finished. I hope it gets at least one review. Peace out to any that read _My Special Keeper_.


End file.
